Gingerbread is my bitch

It's on....... again. Last year's loss in the Gingerbread Competition still brings a tear to my eye. Spike and I were completely and totally robbed and so we decided that we wouldn't put as much effort into it this year. We didn't want all of the thoughtful planning and hard work to end in pain and anguish like it did last year. However, the two of us are a bit insane and are perhaps a tad anal retentive, as well. So on Tuesday night, we began our entry for the Saturday competition: the Boston Skyline.

We started out by using frosting to glue blue raspberry Twizzlers to our 18 x 15 inch board. They looked great as the Charles River, the twists even looking a bit like waves. Then we decided we'd better start decorating the sides of the buildings, so that they would have plenty of time to dry before we erected them. We are only doing three main buildings: the Prudential, the John Hancock, and the State House. I kind of want to add in the Hatch Shell on the Esplanade, but we'll see how that goes.

The Hancock has glass windows all over it, designed to reflect the old architecture around it, so we "glued" some blue licorice pieces on a graham cracker to replicate the look. The Pru looks like a typical skyscraper, so we used black Twizzlers to make columns and rows that look like windows. I'm not quite sure how we're going to do the dome of the State House, but we have four days to figure it out.

We reinforced each graham cracker piece with another one behind it and laid all the pieces out on the board to dry. I decided we should put the board in the fridge overnight so that the frosting would further solidify, but when I picked up the board, one of the sides of the Pru went flying off onto the floor. Luckily we had reinforced it, so the damage was mostly to the backup cracker, but it was still very scary and the cause of much cursing and swearing. Hopefully that will be the only casualty of this construction project, but I'll keep you posted.